


Feed

by SheegothBait



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Animal Death, Blackmail, Body Horror, Gen, Murder, Sort Of, Undead Reyes, Unethical Experimentation, Vampires, animal experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:40:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27594263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SheegothBait/pseuds/SheegothBait
Summary: Moira acquires a strange new ability and tries to bring it to its logical conclusion.Some things are better off left unknown.
Kudos: 7





	Feed

It started with an ache.

Nothing new there: her arm ached from time to time. What _was_ new, however, was the envenomed-teeth-buried-in-her-flesh feeling that plagued her on an hourly basis. She couldn’t sleep properly, even with analgesics, and she couldn’t think straight during the daytime. Her projects fell farther and farther behind, despite her attempts to keep up with them. Her lack of sleep further clouded her mind, making her irritable and prone to mistakes. She drew blood from herself and analyzed it, but found nothing out of the ordinary that would explain the pain.

Despite her attempts to hide it, others began to take notice.

When she walked through the halls, she scattered her other coworkers like ninepins. Her lab assistant left her extra coffee without prompting. Maximillien called her about her projects and inquired after her health. Reyes even commented on the new streaks of gray in her hair and her deepening wrinkles, saying she needed to take a break. 

She nearly broke something at that, but figured her time was spent better off trying to figure out this mystery than sapping the life out of Reyes for his rude remarks. 

She drew more blood and compared Reyes’ and her samples side by side. The blood tests were all inconclusive: the nutrient panels and CBCs showed differences that could be explained away, the genetic screenings came up empty or were accounted for. Even the nanites were understandably different, and they acted much the same in Moira and Reyes’ bodies. 

She wrote the research off as a dead end, prescribed herself a stronger painkiller, and soldiered on with her work, trying to ignore her pain as well as her growing hunger. She started avoiding the mess hall entirely to keep herself from indulging in her cravings for high-calorie, nutrient-barren foods. She caved one day and started stashing snacks in the lab. 

She didn’t even really notice her consumption until Gabriel caught her with her hand stuffed into a bag of Tayto crisps partway through his checkup.

“Are you smoking weed for your pain, Doc? That why you got the munchies?” 

Even with his face covered, she could tell he was laughing at her. Her cheeks reddened, and she hastily shoved the bag into a cabinet. 

Gabriel shrugged. “Hey; no judgement. Whatever works for you.”

“Do you have _any_ idea how hard it is for me to work through these complex calculations _without_ the additional handicap of THC clouding my head?”

Reyes crossed his arms. “What are you asking me for? I’m not a scientist.”

She jabbed him in the chest with a finger. “ _Exceedingly._ ”

“Maybe you should see a doctor.” 

The warmth in her face became a blaze as he choked back a laugh. “I’m _fine_ , Gabriel. It’s just constant and miserable. ”

A moment of silence followed her words. 

“Taste of your own medicine, huh, Doc?” He asked, his voice suddenly bitter. 

“I am trying to help you. I can’t rush this cure any faster without stripping your abilities or doing _more_ damage.” 

“Well, now you know how I feel.” 

He wraithed from the exam room, leaving her swimming in a pool of her own guilt. Licking the salt off her fingers helped, but not by much, and she lay in bed that night, turning his words over and over and over. 

After the fourth cup of coffee that following morning, it clicked. 

_Now you know how I feel_. 

Of course. 

She berated herself for her sluggish thinking as she rushed to the lab. With the speed of a college student trying to write an annotated essay in three hours, she located and opened Gabriel’s old Blackwatch medical files, scanned them for episodes where he had experienced the ravenous hunger and pain that was now plaguing her, and cross-indexed the episodes with his old mission reports, adding in the variable of his cessation of symptoms for good measure. She leaned back as the data pieced itself together and read the completed file, her eyes sparkling with the thrill of discovery. 

Gabriel’s symptoms popped up when he went a month or more between missions. She’d treated him with biotics and rest, but that only served to temper the symptoms and allow him to carry on with his day in relative comfort. Furthermore, the symptoms stopped entirely directly following a mission where Blackwatch had reported kills. Given her symptoms were identical, she could make a reasonable guess that, one; her cure would be similar to Gabriel’s, and two; she’d develop abilities similar to Gabriel’s. 

This warranted further research. 

She made her way down to the live subject holding area, a usually-dark and animal-musk-scented area lined with cages. Oddly enough, the smell didn’t bother her as much as usual. Dozens of glittering eyes watched her from the walls as she scanned the rows of rabbit hutches, their agitated tittering distracting. She finally located a suitable subject and extracted the animal from its cage. The rabbit shifted in her arms, made a motion as if to bite her, then seemed to think better of it, settling dejectedly against her lab coat. It was an old animal, one that had been used for at test a few days ago and was dying due to a bad reaction. The only thing the scientists were doing with it right now was waiting and watching, and researching her, and by extension, Gabriel’s, condition was more important.

She nestled it onto the lab table, petting it and murmuring sweet nothings before setting up a recording and describing first the history of this strange disorder, then her own personal history and symptoms, then her hypothesis. The rabbit made a lame bid for freedom, but she scruffed the animal. She shifted her grip, holding it with her right hand instead. She noticed, suddenly, that she could feel things she otherwise would have to go looking for: its fluttery, straining heartbeat, its wheezing, frantic breaths, the tension in its legs as it strained against her, its undiluted body heat.

 _Remarkable._ Was this the way Gabriel always saw things?

She added it to her notes.

She turned her attention back to the animal’s vitality beneath her fingers. She _wanted_ that. Her fingertips and palm warmed, soothing the icy burn. Seconds later, the animal began shaking and twitching. 

And then her pain and the heat vanished.

She let the animal go and checked it for signs of life. She couldn’t find either its heart rate or breathing. Gone.

 _“Tá brón orm,”_ she muttered, but there was no room to dwell on the dead during this kind of work. 

Over the next few days, she noticed that the pain and insatiable appetite didn’t bother her. She could think clearly once again, and she wasn’t woken in the middle of the night to the sensation that someone was trying to saw her arm off. She worked feverishly on her other experiments in the wake of her newly-cleared mind and caught up with some of her research. She didn’t feel the need to shout at the lab techs nearly as often. She even managed to finish and send a report on a project, which was met with pleased feedback. 

Under the cover of night, she continued her research with her strange new capabilities. 

The lab techs in charge of keeping the animals noticed her renewed interest in the rabbits, but were too smart to say anything when their furry charges didn’t return and provided the animals without question. In a few weeks, she’d discovered that her touch caused the animals pain, that she couldn’t use her touch through a barrier like gloves, that a frightened rabbit could sustain her longer than a calm one, that a sedated rabbit didn’t give much less energy than a conscious one. She also learned that a feeding wouldn’t last her beyond a few days, and that returning to the holding areas to choose her next victim was an inevitability else her symptoms returned in force. 

Which meant she had to hunt bigger game. 

She had a subject pulled into her lab at random. The woman writhed like a wild animal, demanding answers and release. Moira ignored her as she set up the recording; the straps on her table were meant to hold SEP soldiers. She detailed the history of her research to the camera, wincing occasionally at the subject’s hollering. She’d have to edit the footage later so the noise wouldn’t render the files useless. She explicated on her work with the rabbits, concluded her summary, and turned to her subject, placing her gloved left hand, then her right on the hollow of the subject’s throat, noting again how the gloves inhibited her touch. The woman jerked away from her touch, abject fury burning in her eyes, watching Moira’s every movement as the scientist picked up a pair of surgical scissors. She cut open the woman’s shirt like wet tissue paper to increasingly frantic demands to know what was going on and bared her hands, repeating the contact on the woman's chest with her left hand first. He talon-like nails grazed against the subject’s skin at first, to no reaction other than the woman demanding to know what had happened to her hand. She laid her right hand gently across the woman’s collarbone, feeling the rivers of heat running just beneath her subject’s skin, marked the time, and _pulled._

The machines wailed as the subject went into convulsions. The heat flooded through her, not enough and too much, intoxicating and overwhelming all at once. 

The heat source seemed to vanish suddenly (per her previous observations), leaving her sated but wanting more. She checked the monitors. Gone, just like the rabbit. Pity. She didn’t exactly like thinking of her subjects as little more than livestock, but she supposed that’s what they were in this specific capacity. They filled a need, but their highest potential was locked out of reach by the circumstances. 

Still, some sacrifice was to be expected. Her research, _especially_ this research, certainly wasn’t without its hazards or losses of life. 

She discovered that feeding on a human granted her a much greater window of time before she was once again required to indulge her strange appetite or suffer the consequences.

She repeated the test a month later with another, a male. He pleaded with her and asked her questions, probing for some answer as to what she was doing. She let his fear mount, noting she could _smell_ \- when had she developed that sensitivity?-his fear as she prepared a syringe.

“Don’t worry,” she assured him. “This won’t hurt.”

She studied his expression as gave the injection and laid her bare right hand against his neck. She saw plenty of fear in his eyes, but no pain as he lapsed into unconsciousness. 

Over the course of the following week, she noticed her physical appearance begin to change. Her wrinkles smoothed over, the various aches in her body fading. Her gray hair grew in vibrant red-orange at the roots. Gabriel, the smartass, commented on her appearance. _(you look good, Doc. What’s the secret? Botox? Hair dye? )_ Her stamina and energy levels were better, her mind clearer than it had been in months.

Amazed, she took to her computer and wrote out a new hypothesis. Stopping aging was a thing; Gabriel and herself (until she became afflicted with this strange condition) were proof enough of that, but the biotic treatments were dangerous and costly. Outside of her work, one could tone the skin, clone new organs, repair the genetic damage caused by aging, and give an eighty-year-old a thirty-year-old body, but the telomeres could not be regenerated once shortened. Aging would still catch up with the individual, and the longer one postponed it, the harder it hit. _Reversing_ aging did not exist. 

Until now. 

She continued looking into her abilities, starving herself one month, glutting herself the next, making some effort to control her appetite and need to feed. She found the smell of fear intoxicating. A scan showed her olfactory bulbs had changed to accommodate her heightened senses. She almost published her hypothesis several times, but the sample size was small. More work would have to be done on this before anyone saw it.

She asked Gabriel about it once, only to be met with very dismissive answers, and, not wanting to raise his suspicions, she dropped the subject. 

She discovered that once initiated, the feeding process could not be stopped. 

She dragged her feet on doing anything with the research. It was a find of legend, something that the science community _needed_ to know. But once it got out, people would demand it, including and especially Talon. With the rate just she was going through humans, giving Talon wide access to such a mutation meant…well, she didn’t know what, exactly, but it meant one _hell_ of a lot of death. A tremendous waning in biodiversity as the human population turned to predator and prey based on their particular affinities and the size of their wallets. _Important_ gene pools lost because she’d released a plague of vampiric humans onto the planet and couldn’t rein them back in. Massive loss of not just human, but animal life as the human population shrank to the perpetually-hungry and the perpetually-hungry searched for new sources of food. Perhaps if she could find a way to stop the necessary feedings and appetites, she might release it. There _had_ to be a patch, and inhibitor, something to restrain the bizarre appetite that the mutations would develop. Science had never let her down before, convincing her if she just looked hard enough, she would be able to find the answers. Surely she could have this under control in a few years. 

She pondered this conundrum long into the hours of the night.

And still her need to feed persisted.

It meant more deaths. Quick, quiet, painless, but deaths nevertheless. Valuable subjects wasted to her hunger. At this point, it wasn’t even research, not really. She began grasping at straws, trying to justify keeping her ability to feed. She had her youth, and her nanites would perpetuate that. Her appetite still demanded to be maintained, else it woke her in agony.

Still, she could not bring herself to scrub her research. 

Still her mutation remained a secret.

Until it wasn’t.

She was alone in the lab, the sterile smell and bright lights comforting to her. The rest of the base was asleep by now, which meant her deed would go unquestioned by the techs and unnoticed by the rest of Talon. She surveyed the body before her, a sigh building in her chest. 

An icy feather of air brushed her cheek. She froze.

“How does it feel, Doc?” 

Her line, repeated in Gabriel’s mocking growl, made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

“I thought I smelled something down here. I was suspicious when you started asking questions, but I thought that was just you being nosy. Tell me; how long have you been hiding this?”

“What business of yours is that?” She asked, biting off the words.

“Curious, mostly. Is your body count as high as mine now?”

“I have to feed, as do you.”

“At least I feed mostly on the dying. Though the smell of this is… _mmm._ ” He hummed in pleasure, a sommelier savoring the scent of a fine wine. The sound scraped over her raw nerves. “I certainly don’t blame your indulgence.”

“It’s _not_ an indulgence, it’s efficient,” she snapped. “I can get more off one that’s been frightened.”

He chuckled. “Keep telling yourself that.” Talons curled around her shoulder in the parody of a friendly touch. “You know what I like most about my ability to feed?” Metal ticked against carbide ceramic as he tapped his mask. “The _smells_. Nothing smells half so good as a target after they’ve been told in detail how, exactly, they’re going to die. I see you’ve discovered that as well.”

She shoved him off and turned to face him. “That’s enough, Gabriel.” 

“Mm, Gabriel’s not home right now, but I’ll take a message. Admit it. You _like_ this. That’s why you have your little squeaky-clean abattoir set up the way you do; it’s designed to terrify because you just can’t help yourself.” 

“ _Enough._ Get out of my lab.” 

“Oh, but Doctor, who will keep your secret, then? It would be a shame if the rest of the base knew that Moira O’Deorain, their doctor, was, in essence, a vampire addicted to the scent of their fear. I can’t imagine how they’d react.” 

She gritted her teeth, wondering just how this had turned into blackmail. Surely Gabriel, of all people, could understand her condition. “What do you want?”

He seized her by the lapels of her lab coat and slammed her into the wall. She blinked away stars as the smell of him reached her: sickly-sweet, decay and mold, putrefication. She swallowed bile. “My _god-_ damned, _mother-_ fucking _cure._ Do you have any idea how _long_ I’ve had to deal with the feeling of my skin, slowly being peeled off, of my muscles being dipped in acid, of my nerves being set on fire but never getting over the pain because there’s still tissue left to _burn_?” 

“I’m tr-“

He pressed his armored fists against her throat, closing off her trachea and stopping her words. 

“Try _harder._ You’re supposed to be a fucking genius. Figure it the _fuck_ out.”

“Talon won’t let me-“ she gasped.

“I don’t fucking _care_ about Talon.” He shook her, making her teeth rattle. “ _Fucking. Fix. Me._ ”

He dropped her, leaving her spluttering on the floor by his feet. 

“All right, I’ll figure it out,” she rasped. “But I need some cooperation from you.” 

“Whatever you want.” 

“Then you’re booked in my lab the day after next. I expect your full cooperation.”

He grunted and crossed his arms. “Fine. Enjoy your dinner.” He took a few steps towards the door. “Oh, and by the way, Doctor, you _will_ get hungrier.” 

Her breath caught as he shadow-stepped out, leaving behind only the lingering smell of him and an unearthly cackle. 

She scrubbed the research into age reversal the next morning and redoubled her efforts to find a cure, the encounter laser-cut into her head. _That_ was the product of her research, and she couldn't live with herself if she unleashed more monstrosities like it. Because that spectre who'd threatened her...that was not her Gabriel.

She knew Gabriel. Surly and sour sometimes, mercurial in his mood. But he had a good head on his shoulders. He didn’t indulge in death. He got the job done and stopped there.

That… _thing_ she’d encountered…That was not Gabriel. She’d never seen that murderous glee, that delight in death, that joy in terrorizing others, in him before. He could be intimidating and coldly practical, sure, but it wasn’t like he sat there and laughed as his victims squirmed like still-living pinned insects. That was not Gabriel. But it was the thing she encountered last night, and it was taking over, if her encounter was anything to go by.

She was the only one who could stop it.

And if the spectre was telling the truth, she was on limited time.

**Author's Note:**

> ***********  
> Hey, guys! I wrote a horror piece for Halloween!  
> ....Oh wait, it's November.


End file.
